Interview: Jethro Tull's Martin Barre

BRADENTON – Guitar icon Martin Barre of the legendary rock band Jethro Tull will perform at Ace's Live in West Bradenton on Sunday night. I had an opportunity to speak with the Grammy Award-winning artist this week, while he and his band were on a break from a few days of rehearsals in Miami before kicking off the tour.

I was only around six or seven years old when I discovered my dad's impressive vinyl collection in the basement of our family home. Included, were copies of early Tull classics Aqualung and Thick as a Brick. Jethro Tull might be best remembered as that British band that somehow managed to incorporate a flute into hard-driving '70s prog rock, but from the opening chords of Aqualung's title track, it was always the guitar that got my attention.

Barre's solo on that track has become an almost mythical piece of rock lore, the holy grail being able to say you've heard it live. Fans who come out on Sunday will enter that distinct circle.

TBT: In addition to your work with Tull, you've had a prodigious solo career. What can music fans expect of the setlist on Sunday?

MB: We like to keep it at about a 50/50 mix. We do a lot of the early Tull stuff, which is kind of guitar heavy, so we can have a lot of fun with it by beefing it up a bit and putting a new spin on it. Then we do a bit of stuff from my solo albums, and there's always a few surprises thrown in as well. We'll do a song or two by the Beatles, where we really add a lot on the guitar side and make it a little heavier.

TBT: On your latest studio album, Back to Steel, there's a very interesting version of Eleanor Rigby. What does it take in your opinion to do justice to someone else’s track, or make it your own, especially when it's such a famous piece?

MB: Well, we really want to do our own thing with it. I would never do a cover straight, and sometimes there are songs that you can't really change, but there are other ones that you can really have fun with and give the audience something quite different but still true to the original, and that's what I really look for.

TBT: You've been playing guitar for a very long time, and you still manage to put out new music that's fresh and inventive. Where do you find the inspiration for moving your sound forward these days?

MB: I'm really just a lover of music, and there's so much great stuff out there right now, and a lot of it really inspires me. But I'm also really into classical music, and sometimes I'll be listening to a classical piece and fall in love with the melody, and draw inspiration from that as well. I’ve found that when you’re surrounded by music, always playing and always listening, the inspiration will come, and it will come from a variety of places.

TBT: You've played on some of the biggest stages in music, and in front of truly massive crowds. What's it like when you get to play a small, intimate venue like Ace's?

Well what we do doesn't change in the sense that we're always giving it 100 percent for the audience, no matter what size it is. There's certainly an energy that's quite amazing when you're playing a big festival and there are that many people in the crowd, but you often can't see past the front row of faces. Everything's dark and you're sort of pretending as you look out beyond that first row (laughs). Then you get into the smaller venues, and it's really nice to have the audience that close where you can really connect with them in a unique way. We've even done very small acoustic shows, where the audience is maybe only 50 people, and then there are different things to consider because the acoustics are such that you can literally hear a pin drop, so every note has really got to be perfect. So ideally, we like to do a blend of all of them, but the smaller ones like Ace's are really nice because of that interaction with the audience.